Olive propagators throughout the world have searched for the secrets of Kalamata cutting success.
Steve Connor, teacher of Mathematics at St Bede's College has studied olives this year as part of his Royal Society of New Zealand Teaching Fellowship.
He is hosted by Lincoln University and is working with Dr. Geoff Savage of the Animal and Food Science Division.
One of his tasks was to find the factors that influence the strike rate of olive cuttings. Steve's interest in olives came about because he owns a small olive grove himself.
"I set up an experiment in the University's nursery which compared four factors that might influence how olive cuttings take. These factors were temperature, humidity, time of year and where on the tree the cuttings are taken from. I used root growth as a measure of success," said Steve.
In the experiment he used cutting material from his own grove and just one variety for uniformity. He chose the Leccino cultivar because it has performed the best of his 10 cultivars. He said with his findings he can now obtain very high cutting strike rates.
Steve found that there is a relationship between where on an olive the cutting is taken from and the environment the cuttings are placed in.
"Winter cuttings should have markedly different treatments to summer cuttings," he said.
To learn how to analyse the data, Steve took a postgraduate paper at Lincoln called Neural Networks Applications.
He said Neural Networks are a cutting edge statistical technique that models the way neurons operate in the brain. Although the technique has been around for 50 years, it is only now that the computing power has caught up and allowed Neural Networks to be used in practical applications.
By feeding the numerical data, he collected, into the programme Steve was able to uncover the complicated way the factors work together. By then feeding in to the programme all possible factor values he was able to find the optimal combination.
"The results are impressive and could change the way cuttings are done in the nursery," he said.
However there is one cultivar, the most highly prized olive, Kalamata, which is notoriously hard to strike.
"To use the same Neural Network approach to Kalamata cuttings could lead to the Holy Grail of the olive industry," Steve said. "Whoever uncovers the secret of improving Kalamata's strike rate would surely be the toast of the olive world," he says.
His unique approach has not been tried anywhere else in the world and he hopes to get funding to continue to study the Kalamata.
For further information contact
Ian Collins, Journalist, Lincoln University, Canterbury
Tel: (03) 3252811 ext 8549.
Email: Ian Collins
Janette Busch, Technical Writer, Animal and Food Sciences Division, Lincoln University, Canterbury
Tel: (03) 325 2811 ext 8114
Email: Janette Busch